


The Death of Whiterose

by Hexiva



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Canon Trans Character of Color, Character Study, Fix-It, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts, Unbury Your Gays, Whiterose Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-02
Updated: 2020-10-02
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26770879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hexiva/pseuds/Hexiva
Summary: Whiterose survives the failure of her project.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	The Death of Whiterose

**Author's Note:**

> Written for my Tell Me What To Write October. Please follow this link to tell me what to write: <https://hexiva.tumblr.com/post/630809303358537728/tell-me-what-to-write-october>
> 
> Prompt: White Rose gets a better ending

Time is running out. Time is always running out. 

She stands in the room of clocks and watches each second fall away, and for the first time in decades she is paralyzed. Time is running out.

She was never supposed to outlive the failure of the project. She controlled for every variable, every factor. Even for Elliot Alderson and his alternate personalities. 

She must be getting old. There was a time some upstart hacker from the US twenty years her junior would never have gotten the better of her. There was a time she never would have needed him to complete her plans.

Time has moved on without her, and she is obsolete.

She has never been one to keep antiques around. When a machine is obsolete, it has no further use, and she trashes it. Her clocks are the only exception: after all, time is the one thing that never changes.

What must it be like to be Elliot Alderson? To be haunted in his own mind by the ghosts of those he’s lost? Would it be easier, if she could still see Chen out of the corner of her eyes the way he sees his father?

She imagines him standing there next to her. If there was a time she could have seen him, it seems like it ought to be now, when she feels so close to the veil, when she feels so unstable. But she remains resolutely, miserably, sane. There is no one else in the room with her.

“What would you do if you were in my place, old friend?” she asks him anyway. 

She knows what the answer would be. There is a gun in her bedside table. That’s how the story ends, isn’t it? Headline for the papers: defeated cult leader shoots self rather than be captured alive. 

Women like her don’t get the happy ending. She has seen that coming from the beginning, has spent a lifetime fighting that. And yet here it comes, the final beats closing in on her as she steps out into her bedroom, opens the drawer of her bedside table, and reaches in for the gun.

Her hand pauses.

If she were the kind of woman to give in to the narrative, she never would have gotten this far.

Her hand shifts, closes on her cigarette lighter instead. 

In the morning, when the authorities stop to take stock of the situation, they will say the blaze started in Zhi Zhang’s clock collection. That the minister’s body was destroyed in the blaze. They will point to the video suicide note e-mailed to coworkers, Zhang dressed in a rumpled suit and clearly disconsolate. 

They will never know about the suitcase of dresses and wigs packed in a hurry just before the fire, or about the fake passport in her pocket, or the private plane she took to the US. 

She watches the ocean fly past underneath her, out the window of the plane. She’ll need a new name, she thinks. Zhi Zhang never fit her, and Whiterose is dead. 


End file.
